potentially very helpful witness, evasion created a barrier, and she couldn’t afford that.
“Professor Whitlaw, we don’t know what to expect, and I doubt you could help us any in figuring it out. I’d say offhand that the David Sawyer you knew is gone. He’s Brother Erasmus now, and Brother Erasmus could do anything.”
“Not murder, in case you are thinking of him as a suspect. Not as David Sawyer, and not as a fool.”
“I hope you’re right. He’s an appealing character.”
“That hasn’t changed, at any rate. Perhaps there’s more of David there than you think.”
“We shall see. Thank you very much for your help with his identity. And I take it that you would be available for assisting in an interview with him?”
“That’s right,- you said he was difficult to communicate with. I had forgotten, in all the uproar. Yes, certainly, I shall be glad to help. Perhaps I’d best brush up on my Shakespeare.”
“That reminds me—the name of his son. You said it was Jonny, I think?”
“Short for Jonathan, yes. Why?”
“The first time I met him, he seemed to be trying to explain himself to me and Dean Gardner, and he said something about vanity, and Absalom, and he also said that David loved Jonathan.”
“Odd. Isn’t it Jonathan who loved David?”
That’s what the dean said. He seemed to think it was very unusual for Erasmus to change a text.“ Although, come to think of it, he had done so again that day. Surely the Lewis Carroll poem told us, Speak roughly to your little boy?
“I’m sorry, but I find it difficult to imagine a fool who is so structured in his utterances.”
“Imagine it. But if as you say his son was named Jonathan, then perhaps he was trying to tell us that he believes his ‘vanity’ led to the death of his son. That’s very close to what you’ve just told me, which proves that he can communicate,- he can even change his quotations if he wants to badly enough.”
“Oh dear. I’m afraid I’m getting too old for this kind of mental gymnastics. I shall have to think about what you’ve told me.
“That’s fine,- there’s nothing more you can do now, anyway. You have my number, if you think of anything. Thanks again for your help. I’ll let myself out.”
¦
SIXTEEN
¦
It was dark outside but still clear. Kate got into her car and drove to the Hall of Justice. By the time she arrived, her bladder was nearly bursting from the cups of tea she’d drunk, and she sprinted for the nearest toilet before making her way more slowly to her office, the coffeepot, and the telephone. It was Saturday night, although early yet; business would pick up soon. Her first phone call was to her own number.
“Jon? Kate. I’m going to be stuck at the office for a while. I hope not too long, but don’t hold dinner. Oh, you didn’t, good. Are you going out? Well, if you decide to, give me a ring and let me know who’s there instead, okay? Thanks. Oh, I hope not more than a couple of hours, maybe less. Fine. Right. Bye.”
Then the computer terminal and the other telephone calls, and when Al called with Kenning’s brother-in-law’s (not brother,- Al, unusually, had gotten it wrong) name and home number, she called through to the Chicago police, found that the man was on duty the next morning, and decided that little would be gained by bothering him at home on a Saturday night. There was no trace of David Sawyer on the records— hardly surprising, since David Sawyer had virtually ceased to exist a decade before.
There was not much more she could do tonight, so she gathered her coat and made her way to the elevators, deaf to the ringing telephones and shouts and the scurry of activity. She stepped aside when the doors of the elevator opened and two detectives came out, each holding one elbow of a small Oriental man in handcuffs, with dried blood on his shirt and a monotonous string of tired curses coming from his bruised mouth.
“Another Saturday night,” she said as she slipped through the closing doors.
“And I ain’t got nobody,” sang the detective on the man’s left arm. The doors closed on the rest of the song.
Outside, in the parking lot, Kate was seized by a feeling of restlessness. She should go directly home, five minutes away, let Jon have his evening out, but she’d told him two hours, and it had been barely forty minutes. Time for a brief drive, out to the park.
Erasmus—Sawyer—no, Erasmus—habitually spent Saturday with tourists and then Sunday in the park, roughly four miles away. Did he walk? Was he already in the park now, bedded down beneath some tree? Where did he keep his stash, his bedroll and clothing, the small gym bag Dean Gardner had fetched from the CDSP rooms and which had been returned (with its contents of blue jeans, flannel shirt, bar of soap, threadbare towel, and three books) when Erasmus had been turned loose after making what could only loosely be called his statement?
Kate got into her car and turned, not north to home but west into the city. She drove past the high-rise hotels and department stores and the pulsing neon bars and busy theaters into the more residential areas with their Chinese and Italian restaurants and movie theaters, the pet stores and furniture showrooms closed or closing, until she came to the dark oasis that was Golden Gate Park.
The park held over a thousand acres of trees, flowers, lawn, and lakes, coaxed out of bare sand in painful stages over patient decades, wrenched from the gold-rush squatters in the 1850s and now returning to their spiritual descendants a century and a half later, for despite the combined efforts of police and social services and parks department bulldozers, a large number of men and women regarded the park as home.
Kate drove slowly down Stanyan Street and along Lincoln Way, cruising for street people who were not yet in their beds. At Ninth Avenue, a trio of lumpy men carrying bedrolls leaned into one another and drifted toward the park. She turned in, got out of her car, and waited for them under a streetlight.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” she said. Astonished, and suspicious, they stumbled to a halt, eyeing her. “I’m looking for Brother Erasmus. Have you see him?”
“She’s a cop,” one of them said. “I seen her before.”
Kate reached into her pocket and drew out a five-dollar bill that she’d put there a minute before. She folded it in half lengthwise and ran it crisply through her fingers. “I just hoped to talk with him tonight. I know he’s usually here in the morning, but it would save me some time, you understand.”
“ ‘S tomorrow Sunday?” asked the second man, with the slurred precision of the very drunk. The others ignored him.
“He don’t come on Sa’day,” stated the third man. “You have to wait.”
“Do you know where he is tonight?”
“He’s not here.”
“How do you know?”
“Never is.”
Kate had to be content with that. They hadn’t told her anything, but she gave them the five dollars anyway and left them arguing over what to do with it, spend it now or save it until tomorrow. All three had looked to be in their sixties but were probably barely fifty. She turned to look at them over the top of her car, three drunk men haggling in slow motion over a scrap of paper that represented an evening’s supply of cheap wine.
“Where did you serve?” she called on impulse. They looked up at her, blinking. The third man drew himself up and made an attempt at squaring his shoulders.
“Quang Tri Province mostly. Tony was in Saigon for a while.”
“Well, good luck to you, boys. Keep warm.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” The other two men automatically echoed his thanks, and she got into her car and turned around and reentered the traffic on Lincoln Way.
In the next twenty minutes, she gave away another fifteen dollars and got more or less the same answer from a woman with darting eyes who pulled continuously at her raw lips with the fingers of her left hand,- from a sardonic, sober elderly gentleman who would not approach close enough to take the contribution from her hand but who picked it up from the park bench with a small bow once she had retreated,- and from the monosyllabic Doc, whom she recognized from the initial interviews.
Satisfied, she left the park, intending to go home but then finding herself detouring, taking a route slightly north of the direct one, and finally finding herself in front of the brick bulk of Ghirardelli Square, still lighted up and
